I preached my first sermon to my home church while still a student in seminary. Everybody showed up to hear it—aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, the Sunday school teachers and youth workers and other mentors who’d had a hand in my spiritual nurturing—all of them about ready to burst with pride at my being a preacher. They sweetly poured on praise with sugar and said my sermon was just fine, bless his heart. One old gentleman went so far as to glad-fist a hundred-dollar bill into my hand on his way out. I reread that first sermon recently, and it truly was terrible. The old gentleman gave me that hundred out of necessity. He knew there was no way I would make it as a minister.
The fact that Jesus’ first sermon worried his home congregation gave me solace. Though Jesus’ sermon excelled and astounded the crowd, they nevertheless suspiciously whispered, Where did this man get such wisdom and these deeds of power? Isn’t he that carpenter’s son? Mary’s boy? We know his brothers and sisters. Implied was a certain presumptuousness on Jesus’ part, received as an insult: Who does he think he is? Matthew reports, “They took offense at him” (13:57). In Luke’s gospel, they tried to throw him off a cliff (4:29).
It was bad enough for the Son of God. For mere human sinners like me to stand before a congregation and proclaim the Word of God exceedingly presumes, especially if you preach from one of those high and lofty pulpits like I did. Who do I think I am to speak for God? Looking out over those gathered, I would catch an eye now and then, engaged and expectant, wanting if not needing a word from the Lord. I’d pray for a miracle of hearing, that somehow whatever people heard would serve them despite what I said.
Thirty-five years after my first sermon, despite giving almost a thousand more and even serving a stint as a homiletics professor, I’m not sure I ever fully got the hang of preaching. The high pulpit felt at times like a pedestal. To deal with the vertigo, we preachers instinctively project a persona, an image for congregational consumption, allowing us to keep social distance between “the preacher” and our real person, lest congregations confuse us with Jesus. However, if we’re not careful, the distance may grow and turn our preaching more into performance than practice.
Jesus censured such overly pedestaled and protected preachers as hypocrites, who “look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean” (Matt. 23:27). Personas as personas non grata, so to speak. Ironically, Jesus did say people should do everything the hypocrites teach—even bad sermons are subject to miracle hearing. “But do not do what they do,” Jesus warned, “for they do not practice what they preach” (v. 3).
No preacher wants to be a hypocrite (from the Greek word for “actor”), but some of us fear risking our full humanity being known. “I’m only human,” we’ll say, as if our humanity is problematic, forgetting that Jesus was human too. The difference, of course, is that Jesus’ humanity was not only human but truly human, a fullness infused with the fullness of God. Jesus got crucified for preaching the truth, but also for being Truth in the flesh. His grace that redeems us doesn’t do so by lowering standards. If anything, Jesus raises the standards.
But unlike the hypocritical preachers who loaded up listeners with heavy, cumbersome burdens and never lifted a finger to help (Matt. 23:4), Jesus made his hard yoke easy to bear. As the apostle Paul preached it, we were buried with Christ through baptism into death so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life now (Rom. 6:4).
In my church tradition, there’s an old title for ministers that we don’t use much anymore. Parson derives from the Latin persona but went on in English parlance to signify clergy. Unlike a persona that projects an image and performs from a perch, a parson (meaning “person”) descends to practice what he or she preaches, bearing witness to both sin and salvation, to both grace and obedience. Our new lives show forth whenever we love our neighbors and forgive those who wrong us, whenever we care for the earth and the poor and the refugee and the widow and the orphan, whenever we speak truth and make peace and do right and worship the Lord as living sacrifices to God. And when we fail because of our weakness, we bear witness with our repentance and reliance on grace, born again yet again, until that day when we are fully like Christ, with Christ.
Daniel Harrell is editor in chief of Christianity Today.
